


far away to the west and south

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff, cheers references and food fights abound, fluff and....weed, where the fuck do the gunmen actually LIVE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 00:33:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12805722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: This is what she always thinks of when they are at the gunmen’s: Where the Wild Things Are, an off-brand frat house, a basement lab, Robinson Crusoe, electrical fires, a high school AV club. Outerspace. Jail time for marijuana possession.





	far away to the west and south

The gunmen have three deadbolts. The first two are horizontal, hugging the doorframe with simple industrial adequacy, but the third is the shiny new baby, the crown jewel of paranoiac wet dreams: a twisting, interlocking system that snicks with satisfaction as it slides home. Mulder is standing behind her, hands on shoulders, in a way that feels somehow quaint. She half expects her mother to be the one at the door. The ceramic in her hands is cooling fast.

Frohike’s face appears at her level, between the door and wall, furrowed and half-smiling. “Password?”

From inside, the loft smells damp but clean. Of laundry and pie crust and old newspaper and weed. Outside, it is crisp November air - something like whiskey warmth spreads from her sternum out.

“Open sesame,” Mulder says. “Hocus pocus. The moon landing wasn’t faked.”

“Wrong. Wrong. _Embarrassingly_ wrong.”

Frohike moves quickly back with unexpected grace like he might sweep his arm out across the empty space he’s making - and lets them in.

\--

Summer had burned off into fall, leaving them with preemptive frostbite and some prodigal, welcome sense of their singular aloneness mildly restored. They touched less but talked more in the bullpen, shooting inaudible and useless shit between their desks. They were cliquish and surface shallow, buddy-buddy, unafraid or unaware of the threat posed by bumblebees.

Besides, with their office in patched up campfire remains, crowded by unwelcome company, they’d had to find new places to perform their awkward, lonely little dance.

Later, she’ll take credit for it as her idea, that the thought of him alone on Thanksgiving with leftovers and John Candy’s TV tin voice was too easy to imagine, finding itself of just to the right of unfathomably sad. But he was the one who called on Tuesday night, so that she was cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear and anxiously scrubbing at a nonexistent spot on her kitchen table with her free hand. Everything in her apartment smelled like Klorex this month. She was running out of space she could control.

“Tell your mom I say hi,” he’s saying. The purpose of the call had been the legitimacy of the set pieces in Titanic, which was on AMC at four. She wouldn’t mind if he never talked to her about ships again.

“Oh,” she says. “My mom - I’m not.” The not-there spot remains stubbornly in the land of the invisible. She scrubs regardless. “She’s in San Diego, with Bill and Tara.” This, too, in a year of utter fucking failures, feels like a defeat.

He sounds genuinely surprised. “You’re not going?”

“To San Diego?” She bites at the name, letting up on the spot and pressing the heel of her palm into the table. Throwing her head back to look up and out across her living room. “No.”

It’s not that she lorded her family over Mulder, that the idea of him alone while she was surrounded and suffocated and loved felt good to her. It was just that it used to be her last vestige of humanity, her carefully guarded little Catholic unit, with their traditions and Amens and old Irish tablecloths. She, Dana Scully, Navy Brat and prissy-smart choir girl of yore, had something that he, Fox Mulder, of the fractured family and boyhood tragedy, did not. She used to dig her fucking nails into that distinction. When she buried herself with him, willingly, she was safe in the knowledge there was still a part of her in her mother’s living room, breathing cleaner air.

And now they were the same. Somewhere along the line, she’d started eating pomegranate seeds out of his palm like candy. Her mother doesn’t have any hope of waiting for springtime to see her again.

She hears the click of understanding. “To San Diego,” he says, quietly. “Of course not.”

“Yes, well,” she says.

“We could watch _Planes,_ _Trains,_ _and Automobiles_ ,” he tries. “Get take out.”

She hums in her throat. He doesn’t really mean it.

“Or,” she can hear him tapping something in the background, maybe the arm of his couch. “We could see what the Gunmen have planned.”

It surprises her right past common sense. She is unexpectedly charmed. The image of Frohike in an apron. Since two weeks ago, with their sudden and successful Bermudan vacation - she’d found herself not unhappily lassoed into the Gunmen’s easy little bubble of mild intrigue and high-quality L.A. weed.

She laughs.

“The Gunmen?”

“They usually make food and watch football. I go over there sometimes, for the past few years.” He’s been spending Thanksgiving with other people? She frowns. This is where she should feel relief but doesn’t. The dichotomy of the Mulder world was such, divided down some distinguished line: alone or with her. With her or alone. She recalibrates to account for the unforeseen grey area: with other people. “Byers makes a mean mulled wine.”

This, she knows, is one of those times where the correct answer is most obviously no. In her careful definitions, there is no more total admission of defeat to some Mulder style conquest than this type of indulgence. Still, in the interest of redefining borders, of pulling up stakes or simply repositioning them she says:

“What should I bring?”

The spot on the table winks in and out of her periphery. She writes a grocery list in small, neat script and underlines _seeds_ twice.

\--

This is what she always thinks of when they are at the gunmen’s: Where the Wild Things Are, an off-brand frat house, a basement lab, Robinson Crusoe, electrical fires, a high school AV club. Outerspace. Jail time for marijuana possession. Not always in the same order.

It is high ceilinged and cinderblock walled. In the main room, there are at least four computer hubs and a massive black futon. A long grey table sits off center, six chairs and eight prints of magazine covers. Drafts of headlines: NEWS OF THE LEVIATHAN. The kitchen is kitty-cornered and lives in periphery - only there if you know just how to turn your head, how to not look like you’re looking.

Langly greets them from somewhere in the bowels of the place - his voice shooting off to her left although he’s nowhere to be seen. “Welcome, strays!”

Through the high windows, mid-afternoon November light strikes over the floorboards. Frohike squeezes her elbow before corralling Mulder off in the direction of the television. “I have an hour before I have to put the pie in, so get a move on, muchacho.” She hears them as they collapse, an already familiar holiday pile, to rant dumbly at the football game.

“This futon sucks,” she hears Mulder say. Frohike huffs. Charming.

Byers appears sans suit jacket - sporting a tie under a surprisingly clean black apron. “Dana,” he says. “Always good to see you.”

He takes the ceramic pie dish from her hands, and she’s left in the hallway feeling very silly, very empty-handed and somewhat like Mulder’s platonic babysitter until Byers gestures vaguely from the kitchen.

It smells warm. Byers pokes at something that simmers on the stove and she sits at a long, surprisingly clean kitchen island overlooking the stove.

“You didn’t have to bring anything,” Byers says. She shakes her head. He sounds like one of her old aunts, all calm and awash in platitudes. All of the gunmen are sketchy about origin stories, but Byers is the only one who really, truly stumps her. His muted suits and easy politeness. He seems a little lost here, somehow, out of place. But then, of course, he is so completely, utterly at home.

“It was nice of you to have us.” She nods at the stove. “Can I help with anything?”

He brushes her off, insists on making small talk like they hadn’t recently hacked into Navy archives and commandeered a fishing boat. Somewhere, she hears Langley emerge, arguing heatedly with Mulder about genocide and JFK until Frohike interrupts to roar at the TV screen.

“I’m glad you could both come,” Byers says. “Between Bermuda and Antarctica, the whole shot in the head thing. I mean, not to sound crude, but Frohike was thinking about starting to place bets.”

She hums over tea that seems to have winked into existence in front of her. “Wait - who got shot? No one got shot.”

“On the contrary, Mulder very much got shot,” Langly says from the doorway. He is wearing black jeans and an Evil Dead T-shirt. One more thing she thinks of when they’re at the Gunmen’s: a comic book - with no one ever changing clothes or growing all the way up.

She shakes her head. “You guys must be thinking of a couple years ago - “

“Nope,” Langly plops down next to her. The weed smell, she realizes, mostly emanates from him like an olfactory aura. “We broke him out of the hospital.” He taps her temple. “Gunshot wound to the head, sister. I guess the ambulance driver who grabbed you didn’t feel like having company.”

She blinks. “I don’t understand.”

“It was a daring rescue. One that left good old John Byers mooning a whole elevator full of nurses.” Byers blushes. Langly salutes. “And one Fox Mulder free to make his daring trek across the ice.”

She thinks, fondly, Mulder, you stupid fucking idiot.

Out loud she says: “That stupid fucking idiot.”

Byers puts a plate down in front of her and starts loading it with an assortment of food for her taste-testing pleasure. Mulder laughs from somewhere behind them and she doesn’t even feel her reactive smile.

“He is that,” Byres says, amused. “And many other things.”

Three more: A treehouse. A panic room. A dream.

\--

All of them gathered somehow in the barely-there kitchen.

“This,” Frohike says, handing Mulder a bowl of mounded milk and sugar and an electric beater. “Is not a charity. Make waves.”

Mulder shrugs dumbly at her from across the counter, sending up a flurry of white as he turns on the whisk. It flutters prettily out of the bowl and then lands less prettily all over the counter and Mulder’s shirt. “Jesus Christ, Mulder. You come here,” Frohike begins to sputter. “You insult my futon, you fuck up my whipped cream - what are you good for, man?”

Mulder throws her a hapless little smile. “I don’t know. Ask Scully.”

Frohike looks her way, hand disappearing behind the counter as he puts them on his hips. “Diagnose him, doc.”

“He’s got a knack for Antarctic rescue,” she says. “Even with a gunshot wound, I hear.” She swipes a finger through the whipped cream. Mulder looks guilty but pleased. “And,” she says, licking her finger, feeling mildly sugar-buzzed and sweetly possessive. “Body heat. Anti Hypothermic. I guess he’s good for that.”

Now he’s gone all mollie-gape at her. Blinking dumbly. Langly snorts and Frohike shakes his head, looking disappointed.

“Well, we can’t all get stranded on the tundra with Mr. 98 degrees,” he huffs, his tone housewife domesticated. “Sometimes it would be nice if your skills skewed towards the human and/or practical.”

“Sometimes,” she agrees, looking thoughtful.

Mulder feigns hurt, blows his whipped cream mess off his palms in her direction and dusts her with powdered sugar like an early snow.

\--

The table is cleared and laid (the only job Frohike deemed Mulder and Langly capable of) with an unexpectedly traditional spread. She wonders if they’re sitting down to eat at the same place they’d picked apart a chip covered in her biomatter and brought down a reckoning from the mountain. Stilling Mulder’s wrist as it hovers over his plate, she says, “Wait - we should say grace.”

She’d expected eye-rolls but gets none. Mulder drops his fork quietly and turns his wrist to firmly take her hand. He says, “Lead on, g-woman.”

They all look up expectantly. A respectful, terrible little silence in which she realizes she has asked for something she cannot have, that she maybe does not remember how to pray. Mulder squeezes her hand, Frohike gently holding the other.

“Dear Lord, for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she swallows, looking hard at her plate and then sideways at Mulder. His eyes are closed. “Amen.”

She’s somehow the head of the table here. Their girl Friday, marking the way on maps. For those who are here and for those who are not, is the rest of the prayer, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to think, tonight, here, of anyone as missing.

The Amen-Amen-Amen echoes back to her and lands squarely in her chest.

  
\--

There was an old _Cheers_ re-run on this morning: Thanksgiving Orphans.

That’s what we have here, she thinks. Although she thinks it’s less about being orphaned and more about just coming into existence like celluloid and light projecting an image in full. No conception, divine or otherwise, just home where you made it or else nowhere at all.

Frohike, she’s sure, sprouted up fully almost-grown. Mad-hatted and sad-eyed. A leather jacket wearing Nostromo, his tenderness unfathomable. It’s somehow comforting to believe he was never a child.

Langly is easy. Langly was born on a college quad, joint dangling from his lips. Half-way gone from a yet started party. Already on to the next best thing. Rudy who couldn’t fail.

Byers she could never guess. She didn’t want to. If she did, she’d end up telling some sad imitation of her own life story and the ending was almost the same. They were here, weren’t they? A little wine mellowed and miles, miles off target. But here they were. For her part, here is leaning against Mulder’s arm at the table, having pulled her chair towards his side so she didn’t have to be the leader of anything.

And Mulder. Mulder whose origins are so idiosyncratic and tragic. Who has made an orphan of her, too, the girl who used to pity little Annie. The hyper-specificity of his childhood like a hero's back-story, so ingrained in her it feels like they shared it. Like at twelve she was sneaking him out the windows at their beach house to look at the stars. Like he is her best childhood secret.

But here he is, still unprecedented, smiling at her around a mouthful of cranberries. She can't think how it is that he exists at all.

\--

She is halfway through a story about Bill and Melissa’s tendency to keep time under the Thanksgiving table by kicking each other in the shins when Mulder interrupts.

“If I came to your mom’s for Thanksgiving, do you think Bill would limit himself to under the table attacks? Because I guess I could deal with that.”

Frohike nods sagely, tilting his wine glass in Mulder’s direction like they’ve had this conversation before.

She stops up short. Did he want to spend Thanksgiving with her family? What the fuck did that mean? She should have let him ramble about the phantom of Fleetwood instead of bringing the conversation mundanely earthbound. Now, she has to think about her tendency to leave Mulder alone on long, grey November weekends. She’d never thought it really mattered. She’d always thought _she_ was following _him_.

And to stop herself from thinking about it, she reaches for her weapon - which is always her way, which is why she is such a good shot. But because this is not her job, she comes up short with one of Frohike’s fluffy white rolls and not a Glock. Scully women make do.

“I don’t know, Mulder,” she says. “There are so many different avenues available to him.” She flicks her wrist and the roll bounces cleanly off of Mulder’s temple. She dissolves into utterly fucking ridiculous giggles.

Mulder is gaping at her for the second time tonight. “Scully.”

“I’m - I’m sorry.” She would love to explain herself. She really would. But there are tears rolling down her cheeks, hiccuping laughter catching at her chest. And aside from proper regression - feelings too big for her to handle, turning her pushy and mean on the playground - she didn’t really think there had been a point.

Frohike says, “That was a damn good roll wasted.”

Byrers, inexorable Byers, shrugs and says, “Well at least we still have the mashed potatoes” - and calmly slingshots a spoonful onto Frohike’s collar.

This is how wars start, she thinks. This is what happens when your girl Friday is falling off the map. Chairs screech back as everyone arms themselves to the teeth. She digs her fingers into the stuffing, looks warily around at the whole table. Langly is crouched in preparation to duck Frohike’s gravy assault. Mulder has quietly taken possession of the entire bowl of cranberries.

Stillness for a good moment. We’re adults. No one is drunk enough for this. The spicy smell of the stuffing makes her sneeze sharply. She looks up, eyes wide. Silence broken. Stillness out the fucking high window.

Mulder says, “Death or glory” with a shrug, and hurls a sticky-sweet handful of cranberries in her direction.

Off to war.

\--

The table is destroyed, but the soldiers are somewhat unscathed. She collapses in a chair after being pegged in the chest with a crescent roll and Mulder crouches beside her.

“Man down?” he asks.

She nods, suddenly slap-happy tired.

Mulder swipes whipped cream off his wrist with a finger, looks, for a moment, like he does before doing something completely fucking stupid and she waits for him to flick it at her. Instead, he holds it out.

“Truce?”

She considers his finger warily. On the not-so-distant battlefield, the frontlines are coming down. “You’ll never take me alive!” Langly yelps from the other head of the table and catches a handful of sweet potatoes in the chin.

“Well-fought,” she tells Mulder. An excuse to do something with her mouth.

Mulder ducks friendly fire, still holding out the whipped cream.

Oh, what the fuck. She’d started a food fight tonight, for chrissakes. She leans forward and very carefully, very gently, takes the whipped cream on her tongue. Mulder smiles. It tastes like he didn’t put enough sugar in it, or like he spilled half of it out of the bowl, which he did, but she doesn’t tell him. It’s lighter than air, melts in her mouth.

“Veni, vidi, vici,” Mulder says.

\--

There are candles on the table and the wax winds down. A romantic, inaccurate way to tell time. Mulder’s hand over her wrist.

“What are you thankful for?” he says.

She opens her mouth to tell him and finds she can hardly speak.

\--

They clean the table before themselves. She and Frohike taking over washing dishes. A militant procedure. The stainless steel sink filled with hot, soapy water - an assembly line of washing and drying. Wrinkled fingertips and dry palms.

“You and Mulder,” Frohike says - it is a question and, somehow, a proper noun.

“Yes?”

He shakes his head. Frohike is burly and sarcastic around the two of them, YouandMulder, but sweetly reticent with her alone. He looks at the water.

“You two are funny is all.” He hands her a pie dish. Earlier, Scully had insisted on gutting the turkey, reeling out its stretchy innards. Mulder had winced, said, _That's my girl_ , and she'd thought he maybe really meant it.

“Funny how?”

Water gurgles in the drain, and he fills the sink again. “Aw, I don’t know, Scully. Just - did you ever think you would be friends this long? I never thought you would be friends this long.”

She has always, always, defined her time with Mulder in terms of how long they’ve worked together. She wants to correct Frohike, to tell him the real question is _Did you ever think you’d be in this job this long?_ The answers are different.

Before she can respond, Frohike hands up another plate. Mulder catches her eye from the doorway without meaning to, bringing in more dishes from the table.

“I never thought,” Frohike says again. He shakes his head, smiling. “And instead, this whole time.”

\--

Mulder comes into the bathroom as she’s carding cranberry sauce out of her hair.

“You look saucy,” he says. She sticks out her tongue. He’s wearing a different shirt - one of Langley’s, maybe. Black with some faded, streaky movie poster on the front.

“You look different,” she says. “In that shirt.”

“Good different or bad different?” he asks,

She shakes her head. “Younger.”

“Good or bad?” he repeats.

That wasn’t the point. She’s giving herself a wine headache.

He perches on the edge of the tub, looking up at her. “You didn’t tell me what you were thankful for.”

“No, I didn’t,” she says. “You didn’t tell me either.”

“You didn’t ask.”

God, they’re both pains in the ass. She is startling aware of how much they might deserve each other. Of what that might mean. She has never been good at getting what she deserves.

She turns on the sink, threading wet fingers through her hair. “Fine. I’m thankful that my landlord decided to turn on the heat before November this year, because I’m sick of being cold until January. And I’m thankful that my bullpen desk is bigger than my no-desk in our office. And that I got to keep my job even though a couple weeks ago, someone tried to drown themselves in a non-existent time-warp vortex.”

Mulder her friend is always somewhat terrifying. That this person, all snap, and wit and quiet warmth, is her closest confidante is somehow unavoidable. That this same person, quixotic and restless and can’t-sit-still, has become inextricably necessary to her, vital organ placed carefully outside her body, is another thing entirely. Necessary in the kind of way that made her kneel on ash floor looking for ruined truths. The kind of way that made her try to go to Utah. Heel-toe-him outside his apartment. The kind of way that made her not leave.

Sometimes, she wishes there were two of him. Wishes she could call her best friend to tell him she was in love.

He shakes his head, grins. Looking up from the rim of the bathtub. “That’s all bullshit.”

He knows already, she thinks then. He already knows.

“Yes,” she says, turning off the water. “Yes, it is.”

-

Dessert, in Langly’s definition, is rolled up nicely into a couple of joints. She shouldn’t, no, really, Mulder, we could both lose our jobs and -

“How is this worse than the time we broke into the Naval hospital?”

He has a point.

“Puff, puff, _pass_ ,” she says, dragging Mulder’s wrist down to her level and breathing in deep.

\--

On the black futon, her heavy head tilted back against Mulder's arm. He has serious wingspan. She stretches her arm out in parallel for a moment and can’t even reach his fingers.

“I kissed you,” he says.

“No.”

“Yes, I did.”

The room smells smoky and still warm. She doesn’t think she’s high per se, but she is not feeling very much like moving.

“When? I would have remembered. I got stung by a bee.”

Mulder makes a wounded noise in his throat like she’s pressed on a bruise. “No, in 1939, Scully.”

She snorts. “Alright, Einstein.”

“I did.” He sits up a little, turning to face her. I did.

“And what did I do?” She touches her fingertips to his temple. He hadn’t kissed her, but he’d loved her. Not so well, maybe, but she wouldn’t be so cruel or so stupid as to think it wasn’t true.

“You punched me in the face,” he says. His eyes are red-rimmed and sincere. She drops her other hand to his chest - he’d coughed long and hard after two hits. She feels his chest rise and fall under her hand. She hadn’t been in 1939.

“Good,” she says, curving her hand to fit the line of his jaw. Stoned and exhausted and utterly fucking bewildered that this is her life, she loves him. She’d go anywhere, anywhere. “I bet I did.”

\--

What _is_ this place, she finally asks, very late, leaning against Langly by the window. I mean what is it. Where are we.

Rokovoko, lady. Not on maps.

Mulder is there, suddenly. She knows that place, he says, hand on her waist, then higher, hot on her ribs. Nodding, she feels like the top of her might float to the high ceiling and hang there like a light.

Rokovoko, she hums, liking him in her space. That’s real. That’s home.

\--

“I can’t imagine not being your friend,” Mulder says, at the end of the night. White Christmas playing now on AMC to mark the forward progression of time. The window is still open and she stands in the square patch of night air and moonlight. If they’ve overstayed their welcome, no one is talking.

She thinks back to Frohike in the kitchen, sighs. She’d thought he heard that. “Mulder.”

He shrugs. “I just can’t imagine it.”

She does not know what to do with her unavoidable, unfathomable love. If she were seven, eight, she thinks she’d give him an Indian burn. Earlier, she’d started a food fight to avoid the weight of it.

Now, she says, “I can imagine a lot.”

They never could seem to get their emotional circadian rhythms in sync. She got caustic when she wanted sincere and he got a full body eye roll and a metaphysical punch in the mouth when he wanted...not that. Sometimes her annoyance with him only succeeds in making her feel guilty. Symbiosis of the masochistic kind.

“Scully?” He moves closer to her. That’s his way, to get kissing close with whatever wants to hurt him.

“I’ll always want this, Mulder,” she says quietly. The air outside is cold. She feels like she’s re-entering the atmosphere and shivers.

 Ever the expert in wanting things she cannot have.

He wraps her up in his coat from behind, back to front, and the silence around them is familiar. She misses their basement, misses the intimacy of their push-pull. She is thankful for him, for his unlikely existence, for their six years. For still counting.

“You know, some psychologists say that if you know someone seven years, you’ll know them the rest of your life.”

“Hm,” he says. “We’re not quite there yet.”

“But close,” she says. She reaches down in front of her, hooks her pinky through his like a child. “We just have to make it to the next New Year.”

She leans to the side to glance up at him. He’s looking down at her seriously, with that particular stillness he has like he can’t look and move at the same time. Like he might break a spell. He nods finally, bringing their linked fingers to his mouth and kissing her knuckle. “To the New Year,” he says.

She suddenly knows she’s promised him something both unspecific and monumental without saying it. This is vital organ transfer, this is time sensitive, she needs this back in her body. But it feels atmospheric and ephemeral, like something she’ll forget in the morning.

Still, she’s thinking, warm in his coat and with a constancy that feels like understanding, years late: This whole time.

This whole time, Mulder.

This whole god damn time.

**Author's Note:**

> “Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are.” - Moby Dick 
> 
> Cheers did it first and did it better. Happy Thanksgiving, weirdos.


End file.
